1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a wireless communication apparatus capable of establishing a wireless communication with a base station in conformity to a predetermined standard such as a wireless LAN (Local Area Network) system. The present invention further relates to a base station detection method for detecting a base station with such a wireless communication apparatus.
2. Description of the Related Art
A type of wireless communication apparatuses as mentioned above includes, for example, a wireless communication apparatus as disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2002-330142 (hereinafter referred to as a “conventional wireless communication apparatus”). This conventional wireless communication apparatus has a communication mode involving an intervention of an access point for a wireless communication network and another communication mode for a direct communication with a client device. In order to establish a connection with the wireless communication network, firstly a judgement device judges whether or not any access point exists. If there is no access point, the communication can be established with the wireless communication network through the direct communication with the client device.
On the other hand, there are many suppliers for presenting a service allowing an access to a wide area network in such a manner that a user makes an access based on a wireless LAN system to an access point which may be connected to the wide area network via a wired communication for example. In order to make an access to such a wide area network on the basis of a contract with a supplier, one or more access points prepared by the supplier must be detected. For this, the conventional wireless communication apparatus sends a detection signal to detect one or more special access points, so that access points existing around the apparatus can be detected on the basis of each response signal of the detection signal.
However, the conventional wireless communication apparatus as mentioned above has the following problems.
That is, in order to detect access points with the aid of detection signals as mentioned above, the detection process must be repeated as many as the number of suppliers that the user contracted with, so that a processing time becomes enormous. On the other hand, it would be possible to simultaneously detect access points existing around the apparatus by means of a common detection signal regardless of suppliers, which is prescribed by a wireless LAN standard. However, for the security, some access points do not inform their existence in response to such a common detection signal, which may cause a fault in the detection. Consequently, in order to detect access points without such a fault in the detection, the detection process is to be performed individually for each of the access points specified. For this reason, from a technical point of view, it is substantially impossible to perform the detection process as quickly as practical.